Today, Boston Dynamics and OTTO Motors (a division of Clearpath Robotics) are announcing a partnership to “coordinate mobile robots in the warehouse” as part of “the future of warehouse automation.” It’s a collaboration between OTTO’s autonomous mobile robots and Boston Dynamics’s Handle, showing how a heterogeneous robot team can be faster and more efficient in a realistic warehouse environment.
As much as we love Handle, it doesn’t really seem like the safest robot for humans to be working around. Its sheer size, dynamic motion, and heavy payloads mean that the kind of sense-and-avoid hardware and software you’d really want to have on it for humans to able to move through its space without getting smushed would likely be impractical, so you need another way of moving stuff in an out of its work zone. The Handle logistics video Boston Dynamics released about a year ago showed the robot working mostly with conveyor belts, but that kind of fixed infrastructure may not be ideal for warehouses that want to remain flexible.
This is where OTTO Motors comes in—its mobile robots (essentially autonomous mobile cargo pallets) can safely interact with Handles carrying boxes, moving stuff from where the Handles are working to where it needs to go without requiring intervention from a fragile and unpredictable human who would likely only get in the way of the whole process.Â
From the press release:
“We’ve built a proof of concept demonstration of a heterogeneous fleet of robots building distribution center orders to provide a more flexible warehouse automation solution,” said Boston Dynamics VP of Product Engineering Kevin Blankespoor. “To meet the rates that our customers expect, we’re continuing to expand Handle’s capabilities and optimizing its interactions with other robots like the OTTO 1500 for warehouse applications.”
This sort of suggests that OTTO Motors might not be the only partner that Boston Dynamics is working with. There are certainly other companies who make autonomous mobile robots for warehouses like OTTO does, but it’s more fun to think about fleets of warehouse robots that are as heterogeneous as possible: drones, blimps, snake robots, hexapods—I wouldn’t put anything past them.
[ OTTO Motors ]
Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.
